Personally although it seems geniune, there isn't really any "proof", just a gay explaining some sort of experience that we can't study cause (whe-hey) nobody wants to temporarily kill themselves to study it.

Anyway, I'm not quite sure about all this stuff so I'm more of a guy who thinks that unless theres proof of a diety of some sorts, the big bang theory seems more logical.

And then you have those crazy ones who believe in a flying sphagetti monster...... Just have a look :/

What do the inhabitants of hell eat and what are their social behaviours like? I want to get into the psyche of a hell inhabitant for a day and walk around in their shoes. As a scientist and documentarian (if there is such a word), I WANT TO KNOW!

Heaven is also interesting with all the harps and wings and stuff...... but it sounds like a nightmare!

Spaghetti monster sounds intriguing too. Mmmmmmmmm... spaghetti with meat balls...... with a side order of Jesus and Satan.... Mmmmmmmmmm..............

What do the inhabitants of hell eat and what are their social behaviours like? I want to get into the psyche of a hell inhabitant for a day and walk around in their shoes. As a scientist and documentarian (if there is such a word), I WANT TO KNOW!

Heaven is also interesting with all the harps and wings and stuff...... but it sounds like a nightmare!

Spaghetti monster sounds intriguing too. Mmmmmmmmm... spaghetti with meat balls...... with a side order of Jesus and Satan.... Mmmmmmmmmm..............

(i know my thoughts are a little bit scrambled right now, so bare with me)i think to simply think this is wrong just because you don't believe in an afterlife doesn't make sense. i don't believe it, at least not to any reasonable extent. but i do like to take ideas from religious things i hear. if somebody else wants to believe something that i disagree with, why should i instantly think the're wrong? also, it doesn't make sense to disapprove of something or approve of something with full certainty. i mean, how do i know that life isn't one big dream, or that i'm not in the matrix? there's no way of knowing even what i touch is real in the sense that i think it is. I do not believe that just because somebody has a profound experience while they die means that there is a heaven. i do not believe that since science can't prove that there is one, that there is not a heaven, however.

What a crock of poo! And what a gimmick that only the gullible and impressionable would buy. If the author is a neuroscientist, he is a pseudo one. If his story is true, I can assure you that his brain was active. It is a fact that most hospitals do not have the right equipment to dig as deep as some neuroscientist researchers like the renowned Michael Persinger. These experts can dig deeper and show you, in the lab, how neural reverberations of the brain are still present and quite capable of eventuating localised consciousness in REM bursts induced by trauma.

The author's brain activity was not measurable, because the cerebral reverberations that WERE present were not detectable using their mediocre technology.

What an ostentatious claim this so-called doctor Alexander makes. What evidence has he got for his affirmations apart from his own hallucinations? Anyone here can lucid dream about heaven, hell, demons, gods and angels and yet that does not prove that such things exist.

In fact, there is more evidence for the self being merely a sense and consciousness an epiphenomenon of cerebral integration. The fact that people can seriously lose their mental faculties over brain damage accounts for something, doesn't it? The fact that we can lose our memories and sense of identity even while we are still alive should a priori tell us something about a dead brain, shouldn't it? And what about the fact that under the suggestible state of hypnosis, living people can believe to be anything (evidence that the mind is empty and open to possibilities of identity that could arise from direct or indirect brain stimulation).

Also, scientists recently succeeded in establishing the existence of a Higgs boson and yet they cannot find any evidence or trace of a "ghost in the machine", making Descartes' hypothetical Dualism seem very much outdated - not to mention what happens to split-brain patients!!

If Alexander demonstrated by any scientific means that there is an afterlife or a creator, where is his Nobel prize? I'm sorry but I cannot take at face value someone who uses a hypothetical idea that has been debated about for donkey's years and calls it an absolute certainty when I have phenomenal lucid dreams but have a head about me to consider that the human brain is complex enough to simulate any reality the imagination can conceive.

Of course he's going to sell his story like the pastor or reverend spreads his interesting and seemingly appealing dogma to his flock. Be careful with some of this material for sale. Don't be so gullible.

"Empty cognizance of one taste, suffused with knowing, is your unmistaken nature, the uncontrived original state. when not altering what is, allow it to be as it is, and the awakened state is right now spontaneously present."

I'm still waiting for physicists to prove that our physical universe exists other than being a construct of our consciousness. So far they are proving just the opposite at the quantum level (read about the Leggett Inequality and recent experiments). It has been proven that the particles that make up the universe do not have intrinsic properties that are independant from those who measure them. Oddly enough, this is known as "realism" and has been ruled out at this point.

So unless you believe that there are essentially two separate physical universes, one at the quantum level and one at the macro level of our everyday experience, then none of what we experience is real the way we think it is.

Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world? Morpheus

^^^ The physical universe DOES exist objectively and it is not a construct of consciousness. Consciousness is something that arose with time and the evolution of life. I can tell you now that our troglodyte ancestors were not as conscious as we are now. The brain evolved into a complex organ and consciousness is the epiphenomenon of its functioning parts. We know this because people can lose their mental faculties when they damage parts of their brain.

The quantum realm can be best described as a pool of waves where peaks and troughs can add or cancel each other out. The measurement of anything produces an outcome because the act of measuring is an interaction in itself - no surprise there - and hence the Uncertainty principle (unfortunately, pseudoscientists out there like to lace this with tripe and mysticism).

The probabilistic nature of the quantum realm is what makes things on a macro scale work even though the rules appear to be different. Quantum theory has proved to be successful on so many levels and gave rise to inventions like the transistor. I'd recommend listening to real experts, particularly those who have worked at CERN and have also written extensively about it and see the practical uses of their discoveries.

The energy that makes up the universe is very real and will go on existing even after we are all dead. It doesn't need conscious beings to observe it. It will still be there with its properties. A neutron will still gravitate towards a proton. There will still be negative and positive charges. The Pauli Exclusion principle that explains why we don't fall through the floor will still be there. Electrons will still behave in the manner that they do.

To say that the universe is a construct of consciousness is preposterous because the existence of matter precedes it by billions of years.

"Empty cognizance of one taste, suffused with knowing, is your unmistaken nature, the uncontrived original state. when not altering what is, allow it to be as it is, and the awakened state is right now spontaneously present."

Summerlander wrote:^^^ The physical universe DOES exist objectively and it is not a construct of consciousness.

Have you every experienced the world apart from consciousness? How on earth could that be done? In point of fact, the only thing you have ever known IS consciousness. You don't ever know an objective world directly. All you've ever known is your experience of the world and that experience comes through the senses. So, the most you can say about an objective world is what you know and interpret of the information provided by the senses.

Take the scientific view of visual perception. Light enters the eye, is collected in the retina where it is converted to chemical signals that are ultimately converted to electrical signals that get sent to the brain for processing. Ultimately these signals magically get converted into an image of the world. This is what the scientists say and what the average person believes.

The brain, encased in solid bone, sits in total darkness for its entire existence, and, yet, makes a picture of the light that it has never encountered. Remember, all it has encountered are the electrical signals, not the actual light which never makes it past the retina. The data the brain has received has been "stepped down" from the actual occurence. How is this picture of light produced when light is never known directly? Is the picture of the light it produces what light really looks like? How would we know? And just where the heck is it happening?

I think its much more fair to say that even if an objective world does exist, there is no way to know that. But I would go further still and say that consciousness doesn't exist in the world, the world exists in consciousness. In that sense, EVERYTHING is a construct of consciousness. This is something every lucid dreamer finds out!